Craig Willse Suspects All Of Us Are Seeking Ways To Avoid Reality

Photo by Salah Ait Mokhtar on Unsplash When people strive for a Dickie Greenleaf summer—whether wearing bowler shirts, behaving petulantly, or just generally being in Italy—I always want to ask, do they remember how that ended for him? In Craig Willse’s debut novel, Providence , Dickie’s demise is part of the canon. The novel tells the story of Mark, a young professor at an elite college in a small town in Ohio. Mark exhumes a body of research on gay murderers in order to interpret cultural discourse around sexuality. When he takes a shine to one of his students, the precocious Tyler, he quickly unravels in Tyler’s world. Providence is a gripping page-turner, tracking a person’s descent through obsession, addiction, and the deception he long studied from a distance. This propulsive novel examines how a person can learn to negotiate the pressures of the world around him and how those maneuvers can lead him into his darkest hours. We met over Zoom to discuss his novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley , gay murderers, and the trauma plot. Michael Colbert: The novel opens in Mark’s classroom with a discussion on The Talented Mr. Ripley . I’m such a Ripley head—I love the movie, book, all of it. Can you speak to the genesis of your interest in Mark’s research subject, cultural discourses on sexuality and crime? Craig Willse: Yeah, that was actually a project I was working on in my early twenties and then put aside for two decades. When the story of Mark and Tyler came to me, the idea that Mark would be working on this project came soon after. There’s a scene when Mark is explaining his research to Tyler and tells him about Andrew Cunanan, who killed Gianni Versace. I grew up in Miami and was living there the summer Versace was murdered, and I was obsessed. I still have a box with all of the Miami Heralds during this massive manhunt. That kicked off for me this interest in how stories about gay murder get told and what they reflect about the period of time […]

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